Death from laughter

Chrysippus died of laughter.

Fatal hilarity is death as a result of laughter. The phrase was first recorded in 1596.

In history

• According to some traditions, the mythological Greek prophet Calchas died of laughter when the day that was to be his death day arrived and the prediction didn't seem to materialise.

• In the third century B.C. the Greek philosopher Chrysippus died of laughter after giving his donkey wine, then seeing it attempt to feed on figs.

• Martin I of Aragon died from a lethal combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing in 1410.

• It is cited that the Burmese king Nandabayin, in 1599 "laughed to death when informed, by a visiting Italian merchant, that Venice was a free state without a king."

• In 1660, the Scottish aristocrat, polymath and first translator of Rabelais into English, Thomas Urquhart, is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.

• In 1782, a certain Mrs Fitzherbert is reported to have suffered from an attack of hilarity while she attended a performance of The Beggar's Opera. When Charles Bannister appeared on scene as Peachum, she burst into an uncontrollable laugh so loud that she had to be expelled from the theatre. She laughed continuously all night long and the day after, and died early in the morning, the following day.

• The phenomenon is also recorded in the book Crazy History where a Celtic soothsayer was able to predict the hour of his demise. As with the death of Calchas, when the time arrived and the soothsayer found himself still alive, he purportedly laughed hysterically, eventually killing himself through either heart attack or asphyxiation.

In modern times

On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn, England, died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies, featuring a Scotsman in a kilt battling a vicious black pudding with his bagpipes. After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure. His widow later sent the Goodies a letter thanking them for making Mitchell's final moments so pleasant.

In 1989 a Danish audiologist, Ole Bentzen, died watching A Fish Called Wanda. His heart was estimated to have beat at between 250 and 500 beats per minute, before he succumbed to cardiac arrest.

In 2003 Damnoen Saen-um, a Thai ice cream salesman, is reported to have died while laughing in his sleep at the age of 52. His wife tried to wake him up but couldn't, and he stopped breathing after two minutes of continuous laughter. It is believed that he died either of heart failure or asphyxiation.

In fiction

• David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest deals with a video tape containing a movie so entertaining that anyone watching it loses all desire to do anything else, eventually becoming comatose and dying. The only person who could watch the movie was the director, who was too insane to be affected by its humor. The coma was mostly the result of returning to the pre-oedipal state.
• In the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World", the eponymous joke is so funny that anyone who hears or reads the joke will immediately laugh themselves to death. For this reason, the joke is used against the Germans by the British during World War II. It was so lethal, each word of the joke had to be translated by only one translator (Two words were able to induce a coma). The words used in the Sketch, whilst sounding German, are in fact nonsense, presumably to prevent translation. The two Python members, John Cleese and Michael Palin, would star in A Fish Called Wanda, which, as mentioned above, made one of its viewers die laughing.
• Al Capp's comic strip L'il Abner featured a storyline in which a nefarious comedy writer sought to commit mass murder by broadcasting a joke so funny that listeners would die of laughter. The plot is foiled when the strip's preternaturally dense eponymous main character, tasked with delivering the fatal joke, reads it beforehand and doesn't see the humor, and so substitutes a childish joke.
• The concept was also used in the mixed-live action/animation movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where excessive laughter was shown to be one of two ways for cartoon characters to die (the other possibility was coming in contact with a concoction known as "dip").
• The Joker from DC Comics uses fatal hilarity as his primary means of murder. However, the laughter (and subsequent "death grin") is derived from the "Joker Venom" toxin the Joker uses on the victim and is probably only a symptom of the poison.
• Terms such as "I killed them out there" (to have made the audience laugh uproariously) and "I died on stage" (to have failed to do so), are much of comedy slang that deals with death.
• In the musical Little Shop of Horrors, a dentist uses the supply of nitrous oxide intended for his patients on himself, finding it gives him a gleeful high. He dies after a nitrous oxide mask gets stuck on him and the pump breaks. Although he actually asphyxiates from the lack of oxygen, his last words spoken are "Are you satisfied?! I've laughed myself to..." and another character finishes his sentence for him, "...death."
• At the end of the 1964 musical film Mary Poppins, the character of Mr. Dawes Sr. dies laughing at a joke Mr. Banks tells him after he is fired from the bank.
• Life, the Universe and Everything, the third novel in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams, features a character named Prak. Prak was accidentally given an overdose of truth serum, causing him to recite the entire history of the universe. When he met the book's protagonist, Arthur Dent, some recalled aspect of Arthur's life caused him to laugh for days on end, and eventually die of exhaustion.
• In the South Park episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die", Kenny dies laughing while watching a humiliating video of Cartman.
• In A Folky Tale, of the Homestar Runner series, Strong Sad's tale ends with, "they laughed until they passed out for the rest of their lives."
• Morrissey's song "Come Back To Camden" begins with the phrase "There is something I wanted to tell you it’s so funny you’ll kill yourself laughing".
• In "Laughing fit," a Code Lyoko episode, large amounts of laughing gas are said to be fatal.
• In the play The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, the character Mathilde says that her parents were the funniest people in Brazil, and eventually died laughing when they discovered the funniest joke in the world. Now Mathilde is trying to find that same joke.
• In 1830, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. wrote a poem entitled "The Height of the Ridiculous," in which his servant laughs uncontrollably for 10 days and nights after reading a particularly funny verse. It is to be assumed that the "wretched man" then expired.
• In the Drawn Together episode "Alzheimer's That Ends Well", Princess Clara's talking vagina (the Vajoana, a poke at Joan Rivers' plastic surgeries) kills a group of old people trying to kill the rest of the housemates by telling jokes and making the seniors laugh to death.

See also

• Motif of harmful sensation
• Kuru (disease), also known as "laughing sickness".

External links

• Snopes.com article
• Nine people who died laughing